WaPo: The GOP is no party for blacks, Latinos, and gays

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Can't have it both ways. The Republican party is opposed to slavery. I can quote Woodrow Wilson, telling black men that they were dumb for voting for him.

Slavery is not a modern issue and back then, the Democrats pretty much were the conservative party. The parties right now are the exact opposite of what they were all those years ago. If you have to go back a hundred years to prove that your party doesn't have race issues, then you have a problem.

He's not 'proving that his party doesn't have race issues'. He knows he can't do that, so instead he's proving that the other one did and claiming that it therefore still does.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Why did the Republicans appoint Clarence Thomas - if they have a race problem?

Oh my God are you even serious

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

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Yessir, answer the question please.

A better question is would anybody have appointed Clarence Thomas if the country as a whole didn't have a race problem.

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What minority, if you don't mind my asking, and what is that even supposed to mean?

Yeah, he did.

He said you should vote out of revenge.

You and your cohort's pretense at being gravely offended by a single instance of unusual but innocuous idiomatic English is cute but really transparent.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I'm sorry. I assumed the question was rhetorical, since a single Supreme Court appointment twenty years ago as your triumphant counterargument is such an obvious and ridiculous derail.

The first black justice was retiring and Bush replaced him with another black justice because there were at the time no other minorities on the court. Nobody at the time really questioned or had a problem with this reasoning as far as it went, even though Bush said that Thomas was the most qualified candidate he could find, which was absurd because he'd been a federal judge for eighteen months.  At least according to Jeffrey Toobin the Bush people specifically went in looking for a 'plausible' black nominee would who be reliably conservative as they understood it, which isn't something that an inveterately racist administration does but which also doesn't inspire confidence in the society that gives birth to such a situation or their own assessment of their relative diversity.

But you knew all this, which is why the same repertoire of specific individuals is always trotted out, along with tales from the hoary past of the Jim Crow Democratic machine states or their wonderful representatives in Congress. Anything not to discuss current policies, demographics, or rhetoric.

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When a presidential candidate takes a direct attack at my livelihood and then talks about revenge, then yes, I am going to be upset. His policies are terrible. His policies are designed to hurt me and many other Americans struggling to make ends meet.
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Seriously, what on Earth is your livelihood that you perceive the President as having taken a 'direct attack' at it? Unless you're a big-shot financier or involved in fossil fuels or some sort of abstruse religious work what could you possibly do for a living and what minority could you belong to that you would have any reason to believe Obama has any interest in intentionally hurting you?

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

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But why Clarence Thomas? It's not like he's less qualified than any of the other members of the court.

This is a point that can be argued.

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Not so. Go through the archives and look at the previous responses to Supreme Court Nominees. It didn't used to be political - but the Democrats drug Thomas through the mud (see the whole Anita Hill nonsense). This was after Bork and they tried their best to actually deny Thomas the nomination. That's right - the party of Slavery voted en masse against Clarence Thomas. Isn't that the sign that the Democrats have a racism problem? [/quote]

Feel perfectly free to ascribe that motivation to them, but the other possibility was that they had a problem with him because he was (a) extremely conservative and (b) accused, possibly not without reason, of being a pervert. Of course, it's possible racism could have exacerbated this.

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So you think Thomas has been a disgrace to the court in the 20 years that he's served?[/quote]

Yes, for all the usual reasons (using the office for even more blatantly political ends than the other justices, not saying anything in oral argument for over half a decade...).

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So, it's not about race then. That's what I'm saying. Thomas was chosen because he was a qualified justice who didn't have a long record (remember the crap that Bork got tossed out), who was a conservative. [/quote]

Eh, again, you can definitely debate that.

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So show me where the present republican party is being racist - or is opposition to Obama automatically racist?[/quote]

The problem is more with Hispanics than blacks, at this point. A lot of the nativist angst surrounding Obama is vaguely racist in import, but that's really more of a base/Tea Party thing than anything else. Accusations of odd tokenism aside, the Republican establishment doesn't have as much of a problem with black people as black people by and large have with the Republican establishment.

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Okay, sorry. I wasn't aware of this. Is the Obama administration actually worse than administrations past, or just not any better? (I don't know nearly as much about issues facing deaf people as I'd like to.)

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By cutting Obamacare's threshold to 30 hours. I lost 4 hours a week thanks to the President.
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I'm sorry that happened to you but I doubt that was the intended result.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

He's going to be the best remembered black supreme court justice fwiw.

That would both require a reassessment of Marshall's legacy downwards and depend on what other black justices there are in the future.

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Well obviously that's bullsh**t and something that any self-respecting health care law should do differently; but Obamacare as written and enacted isn't really a self-respecting health care law, is it? (Also, my contraceptives? I don't even know exactly how condoms work, or have any reason to.)

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That's a problem. I won't deny in the future that you have an entirely legitimate beef with Obama and his administration.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

The fact that there's no obvious answer to that question should be the first big, fat, glow-in-the-dark red flag that it was a botched paraphrase of a cliched proverb and reading more into it is stupid. That or it's a conspiracy of some kind.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

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Oddly enough liberals are at a loss to explain it.

All right, you give me a shot, then.